Our planet is in trouble. Climate change is real. Widespread, tumultuous change has occurred in our atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and cryosphere, driving weather and climate extremes, anomalies, and record heat across the globe. Already, the damage has been substantial. ‘[Climate change] has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people’ (Sixth Assessment Report, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC). And the cause is well known. Decades of research and legions of scientists attest unequivocally that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, threatening to precipitate unprecedented levels of global heating across the planet.

In Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville weaves a fictional narrative around her grandmother, a woman she remembers as ‘aloof, thin, frowning, cranky’, and knew through her mother’s stories as ‘uncaring, selfish, unloving. Even a bit mad.’

Having worked for the Democrats in the United States and as chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Bruce Wolpe has credentials. Few in Australia are better placed to examine the implications for Australia, and particularly the Labor government, of a possible Trump return in 2024. 

Myths about space travel have always been uncomfortably tangled with incarceration and exile. Author Manu Saadia has described the private plans of the current crop of hubristic billionaires as ‘carceral fantasies’. Despite science fiction’s recent utopian turn, there is no reason to believe that space colonisation will be anything but a repeat of the earthly version’s violent history. Giants, too, have a long mythology and once held a significant place in literature, from Atlas to Swift and Wilde; both burdensome and burden-carrying, they often have an outcast sadness. Pip Adam’s fifth book, Audition, brings these myths together. 

Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.

There is every reason for wanting to get to the bottom of Rupert Murdoch. It is arguable that he has done more than any modern individual to shape public life, policy, and conversation in those parts of the Anglosphere where his media interests either dominate or hold serious sway. His influence is richly textured, transformative. Beyond bringing a populist insouciance to his host of print and television properties, he is also unafraid of using his reach as a political weapon, a tactic used with such vehement ubiquity that governments pre-emptively buckle to what they suppose is the Murdoch line. Debate is thus distorted and circumscribed. Public anxiety is co-opted as a cynically exploited tool of sales and marketing.

When Justice Anthony Besanko released his judgment on the Ben Roberts-Smith versus Fairfax defamation case on 1 June, there was a lot more riding on his decision than the reputation of the principal parties and who would be landed with the eye-watering legal bills. Had the verdict gone against Fairfax, its reporters, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and, to a lesser extent, Dan Oakes, would have struggled to return to or resurrect their careers. Defeat would have had a chilling effect on genuinely probing investigative reporting. In the face of such a decision, media organisations and editors around the country would have thought long and hard about letting their journalists pursue well-connected and well-resourced public figures, let alone defend their findings in court. But there was more at stake than that. The ‘defamation trial of the century’ was also widely, if inaccurately, regarded as a war crimes trial by proxy. While Roberts-Smith was not on trial for any of the crimes McKenzie and Masters alleged that he had committed or facilitated, had Justice Besanko found that the reporters had defamed him it would have made the pursuit of war crimes charges against Roberts-Smith more unlikely, or more difficult. The sense of relief at Besanko’s judgment was near universal. It not only emboldened the nation’s investigative reporters and their editors but also opened the way for the full and free pursuit of those members of Australia’s Special Forces credibly identified by the Brereton Report (2020) as having committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.

In an exuberant essay anticipating the publication of Eleven Letters to You, the critic and editor Helen Elliott describes the deep pleasure of working on the book: ‘The satisfaction of writing this book, of making it as good as I can has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. A necessary joy, the deepest new, an entirely selfish pleasure. A small and ravishing bomb inside me’ (The Monthly, May 2023). After this introduction, it was a relief to read the book and find that it doesn’t disappoint. The exuberance of the writing process filters through to the finished pages, populated with ostensibly ‘ordinary people’ – Elliott’s highly provisional term – who have made a deep impression on the writer.

Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint – and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.